‘Homage’ suggests that Pizzolatto was honoring Ligotti or showing him respect of some sort. Padgett explicitly addresses Pizzolatto’s claims that his use of Ligotti is a kind of homage to the writer: Pizzolatto has been nominated for an Emmy for writing True Detective, while Thomas Ligotti labors in near obscurity” (1). Davis points out that, “writers work hard to produce original ideas, stories, and dialogue, and it is unfair for another writer to pawn off those ideas as their own.
Mike Davis and Jon Padgett see Pizzolatto’s “signaling” as far more problematic. Pizzolatto acknowledges that “in episode one there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers” (Calia 2). Whether this use of Ligotti’s text constitutes plagiarism or merely allusion caused a minor furor in the media during the first season. It is no secret that Nic Pizzolatto, the writer of True Detective, “borrowed” sections of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Keywords: True Detective, Terrestrial Horror, Thomas Ligotti, Pessimism, Ecocriticism, Cosmic Horror Hence, True Detective enacts a more practical approach to Ligotti’s horror, one I’m calling terrestrial horror.
Rather than the decay and degeneration of the landscape as reflective of the past, such squalor points forward to a time, rapidly approaching, when the setting will itself be swallowed by the sea. In doing so, the series employs Southern gothic conventions to look forward rather than backward in time. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” (“Long Bright Dark”). Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series.
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